Have you ever heard of 7-year-old Alex Evans (the kid in the video above)? What about Aidan Clark and his pal Khalid Caraballo? Nothing yet? How about 6th-grader Drake Shumard and his 4th-grade sister, Sarah? They got busted for firing an unlicensed nerf handgun before school one day. Obviously they had to be taken down - hard!
And surely you're familiar with the story of 7-year-old Joe Welch. He's the little hooligan who received a suspension from school for shaping a breakfast pastry into what his teacher thought "looked like a gun."
If you're not aware of these events it's probably because you've been distracted by the media's outrageously outrageous "overreaction" to local crime events like the Boston Marathon bombing. If you're one of those who have been taken in by Establishment Media sensationalism, here are a few random samples of what is - without question - the true threat to our society: the proliferation of imagination and playfulness among the nation's tweener and pre-teen youth:
A 5-year-old boy at Dowell Elementary School in Lusby, Maryland, was given a 10-day suspension for bringing a "cowboy style cap gun" onto his school bus in order to show it to his friend. School authorities proceeded to
A six-year-old boy was punished because he took a plastic Lego gun roughly the size of a quarter on a school bus headed to Old Mill Pond Elementary School in Palmer, Mass. (READ: Kindergartener gets detention, forced to apologize for tiny Lego gun)
An 8th-grader in West Virginia was suspended and, shockingly, arrested after he refused to remove a t-shirt supporting the National Rifle Association returned to school on Monday. The 14-year-old then returned to school wearing exactly the same shirt, which depicts a hunting rifle with the statement "protect your right." (READ: Eighth-grader arrested over NRA shirt returns to school in same shirt)
At Poston Butte High School in Arizona, a high school freshman was suspended for setting a picture of a gun as the desktop background on his school-issued computer. (READ: Freshman suspended for picture of gun)
At D. Newlin Fell School in Philadelphia, school officials reportedly yelled at a student and then searched her in front of her class after she was found with a paper gun her grandfather had made for her. (READ: Paper gun causes panic)
In rural Pennsylvania, a kindergarten girl was suspended after she told another girl that she planned to shoot her with a pink Hello Kitty toy gun that bombards targets with soapy bubbles. (READ: Kindergartener suspended for making 'terroristic threat' with Hello Kitty bubble gun)
At Genoa-Kingston Middle School in northeast Illinois, a teacher threatened an 8th-grader with suspension if he did not remove his t-shirt emblazoned with the interlocking rifles insignia of the United States Marines. (READ: Junior high teacher tells kid to remove Marines t-shirt or get suspended)
At Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Maryland, a 6-year-old boy was suspended for making the universal kid sign for a gun, pointing at another student and saying "pow." That boy's suspension was later lifted and his name cleared. (READ: Pow! You're suspended, kid)
This craziness relates to a topic from the other day, regarding the harm that is being done to our men. The "zero-tolerance" nonsense in the schools is just part of a bigger problem. And it's one that affects not just men but women as well. And lest you think that this is merely a crazy-right-wing-Faux-News-flim-flam, I suggest you take it up with Camille Paglia:
Paglia disparages the mushiness that has become rampant in American culture, beginning as early as kindergarten.
"Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, and observes how difficult it is for boys in schools that have discontinued recess.
"They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."
Paglia is especially tuned in to this situation now that she is raising her 11-year-old son with her ex-partner, artist and teacher Alison Maddex, who lives nearby. Paglia sees that “female values,” such as sensitivity, socialization, and cooperation, are fostered and put up on a pedestal in schools over creative energy and the teaching of hard facts.
She notes that it only gets worse in colleges and universities.
"This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness,” Paglia told Weiss. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now."Glenn Reynolds wrote about the hysteria in our schools in USA Today:
Last week, the Wall Street Journal's Alison Gopnik reported on research from professors Jacqueline Wooley at the University of Texas and Paul Harris at Harvard that showed a surprising degree of sophistication among preschool kids. Apparently, though they spend a lot of time in fantasy pursuits, they're actually quite good at distinguishing fantasy from reality:Some of it has to do with the understandable anxiety of teachers and school administrators who are worried about the next Sandy Hook. In that context it's only natural that those adults who are charged with teaching and supervising children would be vigilant for warning signs. But more often than not it's merely an excuse for laziness and ideological prejudice. Reynolds continues:
Children understand the difference. They know that their beloved imaginary friend isn't actually real and that the terrifying monster in their closet doesn't actually exist (though that makes them no less beloved or scary). But children do spend more time than we do thinking about the world of imagination. They don't actually confuse the fantasy world with the real one; they just prefer to hang out there.On reading that, my first thought was that these kids are actually a lot better at distinguishing between fantasy and reality than the teachers and administrators in the schools that they attend.
At South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pa., for example, 10-year-old Johnny Jones was suspended for using an imaginary bow and arrow. That's right - - not a real bow and arrow, but an imaginary bow and arrow. A female classmate saw this infraction, tattled to a teacher, and the principal gave Jones a one-day suspension for making a "threat" in class.
To be fair, it probably takes a lot of imagination to turn what sounds like a bit of old-fashioned cowboys-and-Indians play into a "threat." But while the principal, John Horton, gets an "A" for imagination, he deserves an "F" for distinguishing between imagination and reality. Sadly, he's not alone.
You've probably also heard about the 7-year-old Maryland boy who was suspended for gnawing a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun. And then there's the case of the 8-year-old Arizona boy whose drawings of ninjas and Star Wars characters -- and interest in, gasp, zombies -- led to threats of expulsion. And, of course, there's the six-year-old boy charged with "sexual harassment" for kissing a girl. So much for Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher.Obviously there is quite a bit of psychological projection going on in these schools, where liberal teachers play out their own left-wing control fantasies at the expense of little kids who don't have a clue what they've done wrong. This kind of thing happens at all levels of our educational system. It's bad enough when a college professor decides to stop being an educator in favor of being a tenure-protected activist for "social justice." It's unforgivable when it's a primary school teacher doing it to 6-year-olds.
So is this steady stream of incidents an indication of widespread mental deficiency among America's K-12 educators? In a word, yes.
It's already well-established that education majors have the lowest test scores of any college major, but nonetheless tend to graduate with high grades. That certainly suggests a lack of critical faculties. But the constant stream of stories of zero-tolerance stupidity suggests that there's something more lacking here than just academic smarts: There seems to be a severe deficit of the very sort of critical thinking that the education industry purports to be instilling in kids. One might dismiss any one of these events as an isolated incident, but when you have -- as we clearly do -- a never ending supply of such incidents, they're no longer isolated: They're a pattern.
This is a serious PR problem for the American education establishment, but underlying the bad publicity is a serious substantive problem: When your kids attend schools like these, they are under the thumb of Kafkaesque bureaucrats who see no problem blotting your kid's permanent record for reasons of bureaucratic convenience or political correctness.
At some point, voluntarily putting your kid in such a situation looks a bit like parental malpractice -- especially if your kid is a boy, since boys seem to do worse in today's nearly-all-female K-12 environment. A private industry that generated this much bad publicity would be in trouble already.As Reynolds points out, there is a serious problem with our teachers and administrators but it's the children who are paying the price. Whatever justification there might be for being concerned about a child with a pop tart gun or an imaginary grenade or bow & arrow, the kinds of draconian responses in the examples listed here are way beyond inappropriate. In my opinion they are examples of bullying and in some cases, child abuse.
Reynolds talked about the apparent "mental deficiency" of these teachers. And he's not alone in that assessment:
"These zero-tolerance policies are psychotic, in the strict sense of the word: psychotic means 'out of touch with reality,'" Dr. Leonard Sax, a Pennsylvania psychologist and family physician, and author of "Boys Adrift," told FoxNews.com.The problem is that so many of these teachers and administrators think that they are being logical in their assumptions but in reality they are simplistic, heavy-handed and completely misguided. For example:
A Hayward, Calif., elementary school is planning a toy gun exchange for later this month, modeled after the exchanges law enforcement authorities hold to collect real guns. Kids who hand in the play weapons will get a book and a raffle ticket for a bicycle. Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill said he hopes rounding up the toy guns will stop kids from growing up to play with real ones.
"Playing with toy guns, saying 'I'm going to shoot you,' desensitizes them, so as they get older, it's easier for them to use a real gun,' Hill told the Mercury News.That may sound like a reasonable assumption to make but in reality it's just mental laziness. In fact it's absurd.
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